Connect the Dots 101

On January 6th, supporters of former Republican President Donald J. Trump—not Black Lives Matter protesters, not the Mexican caravan, not antifa—interrupted the Electoral College count; vandalized the Capitol; beat, stabbed, maced and tased 140 law enforcement officers assigned to the United States Capitol Police and the Metropolitan Police Department of the District of Columbia.  

US Capitol Police officer Brian Sicknick was killed by the mob. 

On March 4th, Congress was shut down as a precaution against a threatened second assault. While it defies common sense that the same ilk that essentially—sometimes literally—sucker-punched under-equipped Capitol police officers was likely to try their luck against thousands of armed National Guardsmen, the decision was made to err on the side of caution.

Big mistake.

The deplorables who descended on Washington already have an inflated sense of their own significance. Either the Capitol is sufficiently protected or it isn’t.

What should be more alarming to America than the specter of Trump terrorists taking over the Capitol again is the reality of the Republican response. Far from being chagrined or apologetic, the January 6th insurrection has become a point of pride for ambitious GOP politicians like Missouri Senator Josh Hawley who draped himself over a lectern at the CPAC convention in Orlando like a bad lounge singer: “You know, on January the 6th, I objected to the Electoral College certification. Maybe you heard about it.”

Within days of the insurrection, according to the New York Times, “prominent Republicans, party officials, conservative media voices and rank-and file voters began making a rhetorical shift to try to downplay the groups’ violent actions” and intentions. 

In a 2018 essay ”The Constitution of Knowledge,” Jonathan Rauch describes the information ecosystem in democracies that winnows out nonsense. “We let alt-truth talk but we don’t let it write textbooks, receive tenure, bypass peer review…or dominate the front pages.”

That is no longer the case. 

Basic definitions and standards of proof and constitutionality have been scrapped. 

• For how long was Trump called a populist? How rarely was he called a demagogue? 
• How long did it take the press to call a lie a lie? 
• Why was he seldom if ever asked to explain why he thought Article II in the Constitution made him king?)

For the foreseeable future, Trumpism will remain a threat to “ourselves and our Posterity” because of its success in sidestepping those constraints.

An extensive body of fiction–a new national mythology–has been created by an unholy alliance between corporate right wing media and a professional Republican political class that has elevated fissure and fault lines over facts. 

A growing segment of the public—driven by passion, ignorant of history and immune to evidence and rational discourse—has created a post-Enlightenment wasteland. Anyone with a keyboard and an internet connection—or a brick, it seems—can demand an equal voice at the table.

“As long as we’re here we may as well start a government,” declared one of the insurrectionists while rioters rifled through the desks of the same Senators who, only weeks later, would acquit the President responsible for the sacking of the Capitol.

That is how low Trumpism has brought us. 

The parameters of the national debate about democracy and the Republic have been dictated by the undereducated and the uninformed and manipulated by the unprincipled. It is time for them to be re-set.

To be clear— this is not about formal education. Harvard and Yale law school didn’t do anything for Ted Cruz and Josh Hawley. There isn’t a glimmer of daylight between them and the mob. 

Lead impeachment manager Rep. Jamie Raskin put it this way: 

[W]hen Tom Paine wrote Common Sense, the pamphlet that launched the American Revolution, he said that common sense really meant two different things. One “common sense” is the understanding that we all have without advanced learning in education—“common sense” is the sense accessible to everybody. “Common sense” is also the sense that we all have in common…”

…our shared norms and expectations.

House impeachment managers provided the Senators with a meticulous presentation detailing Trump’s history—in Tweets and rally speeches and phone transcripts—of incitement, intimidation and manipulation in service of the Big Lie that he won the 2020 presidential election against Joe Biden. 

It didn’t take a post-graduate education to connect the dots that led to the trashing of the Capitol. Common sense should have sufficed.

All but seven Republicans stood with the coupists and the cop-killers and acquitted Trump.

What the impeachment managers could not do, within the confines of a process that required Republican votes for its success, was to connect the dots between other GOP elephants in the room:

• To what extent have the Electoral College, gerrymandering, the filibuster and robust voter suppression given the GOP a larger national influence than their numbers warrant?
• To what extent was the insurrection—an attempt to overturn the results of a free and fair election—a logical outgrowth of the efforts by state Republican parties nationwide to suppress the vote? 
• How clear is our understanding of the popular narrative of a divided electorate? The Trump campaign, for example, attempted to use the issue of Confederate monuments as a wedge issue. How did it come to pass that the Mississippi state legislature—with the support of 73% of the state’s voters—came to a bi-partisan, interracial decision to drop the Confederate battle insignia from a redesigned state flag?

There are many, many more questions. 

It will take a generation of grad students and journalists to flesh out the full extent of the criminality of the Trump administration and the damage done to our institutions. 

It will take an alert electorate to avoid committing the same mistakes.